When it comes to abstinence, it seems we just can’t get enough. Back in the free-for-all days of the Bush administration, an astounding $1.5bn federal dollars was invested in the project of telling unmarried teenagers that the only thing they needed to know about sex was to not have any. In 2009, the Obama administration shifted to an evidence-based approach to sex and health education, and as a result, redirected federal efforts toward programs with better records in bringing down teen pregnancy rates, reducing sexually transmitted diseases, and improving the health literacy of students.

But the purity party is on again. One of the less well-known provisions of the Affordable Care Act, forced in by conservative lawmakers, calls for a return of abstinence-only sex education programs in public secondary education. To be fair, it wasn’t just the naysayers who gained from healthcare reform; the Affordable Care Act also sets aside funds for sex and health education programs that have been proven to work. But conservatives managed to shoehorn an extra $50m per year over five years for abstinence-only programs.

At the same time, a number of states – Texas, Tennessee, and Wisconsin among them – are launching aggressive legislative efforts to promote abstinence-only education. In Tennessee, for instance, a bill that passed the house and senate in April 2012 specifies that teachers must “exclusively and emphatically” endorse abstinence, or face a $500 fine. The bill stipulates that contraceptives may be discussed only as an inferior means of preventing pregnancy and disease. The bill also allows parents to sue public school teachers and staff for allowing students to engage in what is bizarrely termed “gateway sexual behavior” – such as holding hands or hugging.

Everyone agrees that it is wise to present abstinence as a desirable behavior for students. The problem has to do with the “only” part. Once again, it is important to rehearse the basic problems with abstinence-only education. The first is that these programs just don’t work. According to a 2011 study from the University of Georgia, abstinence-only education “does not reduce and likely increases teen pregnancy rates”. Such programs are worse than ineffective; misinformation is pervasive.

At least one Texas curriculum, Wonderful Days, taught the dangerously false notion that “natural fertility regulation” – the rhythm method – has the “highest … user effectiveness rate.” In an attempt to help students understand fertility, Wonderful Days offered an outlandish little rhyme: “If a woman is dry, the sperm will die. If a woman is wet, a baby she may get!” States and regions with long histories of abstinence-only education programs turn out to have high growth in teen pregnancy rates and STDs.

Another problem with abstinence-only programs is that they frequently promote limiting and obnoxious ideas about gender and sex. The “Just Say Yes” curriculum, widely used in Texas schools, for instance, tells students that “if a guy is breathing, then he’s probably turned on.” It advises women “to think long and hard about … the way you come on to guys”. South Carolina’s Heritage program, which has received millions in taxpayer dollars, says that “girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts.”

A perhaps less widely appreciated problem with abstinence-only education, though, is that it involves the destructive entanglement of religion and public education. The federal government requires that abstinence programs be free of overt religious messages, and the programs themselves may appear to be secular, scrubbed of references to God or Jesus. But the people behind the programs overwhelmingly come from fundamentalist religious groups, and make no bones about the fact that they see these programs as part of their religious mission. The widely used curriculum Choosing the Best, Inc, for example, was written by a former national director of the youth-focused, multimillion dollar evangelical missionary group, Campus Crusade for Christ.

The abstinence-only programs are part of a much wider strategy by these groups to insert themselves in public schools. As health and character education have become a part of public school curricula, fundamentalist religious activists have found a way to piggyback into the schools, supplying them with programs that ostensibly aim to dissuade teens from drunk driving and drug use, for example, but which end with a call to come to Jesus.

The Choosing the Best curriculum is currently being introduced in over 65 Dallas-area public schools through the Tony Evans Ministry’s Church-Adopt-a-School program. This allows representatives of the church to enter the schools and “mentor” children while implementing character education, anti-drug programs, and other services.

The resurgence in abstinence-only education and similarly crypto-religious programs has been stimulated by huge budget cuts to public education nationwide. The premise is by now almost hackneyed: cut funding to public schools, especially in disadvantaged areas, where the need for education is greatest; observe that the public schools are failing and its children are under-served; bring in the churches to solve the problem. Tony Evans gets straight to the point:

“When you have to put metal detectors into your hallways, you don’t want to discuss the separation of church and state. You want help.”

Advocates of abstinence-only programs have learned to promote their agenda in the language of science and secular education. Unfortunately, the studies they cite are either not scientific, or are limited in scope, and their claims largely unfounded. But no amount of evidence seems able to stop the abstinence-only gravy train – and the reason for that is quite straightforward: abstinence-only education represents a certain conviction about the role of religion. Its proponents imagine that the way to get children to stop misbehaving is to imbue them with religiously-driven ideas about what constitutes a moral life, and convince them that God will punish them for any infractions.

This same conviction informs some of the loudest laments about modern secular culture. In today’s secular world, the argument says, things fall apart, and things fall apart because nobody believes.

But what if the whole narrative is wrong? After all, the studies seem to be telling us that the way to help teenagers to make healthy and self-sustaining choices is not to moralize, but to give them the facts. Empathy comes from understanding, not from indoctrination in stereotypes. In spite of what the “new puritans” are telling us, the path to virtue passes through knowledge, not blind obedience.